Can someone misrepresent a story? And how do you give a good critique of it?

Let's say that you are a writer who has made a popular work. Your work becomes very successful to the point that a movie studio (or television series) wants to make a movie adaptation of it. The studio creates the adaptation of your story but the adaptation seems to misrepresent your story. The adaptation in question fails to capture the nuances of your story and it misrepresents its themes. It could also be that the filmmakers did not understand what your story is about. Could you say that your work has been misrepresented?

I am not a writer but even if I was, I am not sure if I want my work to be mispresented. As readers and critics, we have our own interpretations over what a work is trying to say. We could be wrong about the whole thing or we could only see a small part of a bigger picture. What is the difference between a misunderstanding a work and your own subjective interpretation?

That may depend, I feel, on where you stand with regards to "Death of the Author":

If you hold with it, then any (honest) interpretation of the story as as valid as the authors, and thus any (non-disingenuous) reinterpretation is not a misrepresentation, but rather just someone else's take on it.

Or put another way, under "Death of the Author", the themes that the author desires to convey in the story are not the only valid themes that can be taken from it, nor privileged above any others.

And there's another argument: An adaptation is not the original story, but it's own thing merely based on the original.

That adaptation can thus have its own themes, independent from those in the work that's being adapted. Thus again, an adaptation that takes a different tack to that of the original work isn't misrepresenting the story, or representing the original at all, but simply being its own thing.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jun 5th 2023 at 11:08:50 AM

And then there are the critics who did not understand a story. I remember how there was someone who criticized the critic for failing to understand what the work was trying to say. The critic accepted that but it can be disappointing when a critic misrepresents a work.

Well, yeah that can happen, but whether or not it does is out of the creator's control, beyond making sure that their test audiences understand the story.

I see. Can it get worse if it takes one a life of its own? I know that there are some writers who mind if their work gets interpreted in different ways. I also know that there are some writers who did not want their work to be misinterpreted at all. What do you do if the latter happens?

You can try telling people what your authorial interpretation is—but they don't have to listen.

Ultimately, the author doesn't control the audience; to attempt it is, I imagine, likely to lead to frustration.

yeah, pretty much. there is not much you can do, and it sucks, especially if your critics will deliberately misrepresent or act like they're idiots to mock what they see as "plot holes". The Nostalgia Critic et al really popularised unfunny hot takes like this, and i still get my blood pressure rising when someone (for example) ~ironically~ defends animal abuse and corporate incompetence because they thought Dr. Malcolm's backup in that movie was a bad guy

best thing to do is just make your points clear, and if someone twists it around, that's on them. hot takes have existed since the beginning of time

When it comes to giving over the rights to have a television show or film made out of your story... That's industry politics. You can try to hold onto it until the ones looking to adapt your thing seem to "get it", and then you can either make it clear in every interview that you do not oversee or control the adaptation anymore but the novel version is still yours and very different from the television show...or you can oversee and control the adaptation, and then get a bad reputation in the film and television industry for being an egotistical writer.

Was the extra money worth it? Is the reputation you get in a different industry worth it?

Whatever your opinion about the following writers, they have struggled with adaptations of their works that changed their story: I personally think George R.R. Martin was betrayed by the Game of Thrones television showrunners, but he had to remain civil and now he's getting paid more with another adaptation of something else he wrote set in the same world. E.L. James hated the first 50 Shades movie, but I think the changes that the first movie made actually did improve a bad story. Stephen King hated Stanley Kubrick's The Shining so much that King made his own miniseries adaptation, and that's understandable because The Shining novel was deeply personal about King's struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction (and redemption!) whereas The Shining movie was unethical in its production and Stanley Kubrick aimed to harm people with it. Kubrick's version is still considered the better adaptation and genre piece, because, unfortunately, it is.

As for this question...

Does it make the world a better place, or make anybody else a better person?

If it's a subjective interpretation that also misunderstands and misrepresents a work, then I think it is likely to make the world a worse place: defending a malicious creator's malicious message, or attacking an innocent creator for things that creator didn't even create, or venting to a fanbase things that should really be vented to a therapist.

If it's a subjective interpretation that makes the world a better place, them even if it's not what the creator intended then that can be respected as reader interpretation worth respecting.

What's the difference though? It's entirely subjective if a work's re-interpretation "improves the world" or not. What if it's just Alternative Character Interpretation or a different reading of the moral? How does any of that impact "the world"?

I'm thinking of something like The Portrait of Madame X (oil painting) ...how that was interpreted as a sexual scandal, and as a result ruined the portrait subject's reputation.

People just wanted to jump the bandwagon of being mean and performatively angry.

If the subjective interpretation were closer to, "I think the artist used paint for this one" then that would both be more accurate and not ruin anybody's day.

The case of works that represent (or claim to represent) real people is an unusually tricky one.

It someone interprets, say, Frodo and Sam as being a gay couple, then... who does that hurt?

But if someone interprets as a gay couple a similar pair described in a biography, that might impact those people. (Especially if those people are in heterosexual relationships.)

In the specific case that you cite, looking over the Wikipedia page, I'm not entirely sure that the interpretation was that far from the artist's intent—although he might have intended to anonymise more—and there were pre-existing rumours about the person depicted, which the painting may have fed into.

Thus I'm inclined to suspect that the issue there was less one of misinterpretation than one of a poorly thought-out approach on the part of the artist.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jul 6th 2023 at 9:55:38 PM

With the interpretation of the interpretations of Madame X, I disagree, I think the only thing the painter did was a painting (which is not unethical) (unless it used dessicated corpse parts for the pigment, which was a thing back in the day, but I don't recall being a thing in this specific artwork) whereas a lot of viewers were full of hatred for not really any good reason to direct at one art piece that wasn't even poisoning them with fumes. (Probably wasn't. Maybe. But I bet they didn't know that.)

Whether or not the Balrog has wings is subjective, but if or when that turns into a reason to personally attack other readers then that's definitely twisted.

Interpreting Sam and Frodo as gay is...not canon-compliant? But they had musical numbers about the baths they had together. After Frodo regained consciousness in Rivendell the first time, Sam had all those paragraphs of holding Frodo's hand and blushing because he didn't mean to let on how intensely he cared. If Tolkien didn't mean it that way, he still wrote a lot of material to interpret it that way...

...but if I start sending people sternly-worded death threats on four different sockpuppet accounts for disagreeing with my headcanon of whether Sam tops, bottoms, switches or verses—then I should consider that twisting the source material already and making the world a worse place by using my headcanon as an excuse to be my worst self. (In all but the specific example fandom, this has actually happened and, to me that's mainly what makes a headcanon of a character an illegitimate interpretation. As long as it harmed nobody, the interpretation would have continued being considered subjective.)

And the content of that painting has nothing to do with anything...? Or the context of its subject...?

But that, I would argue, has nothing to do with the interpretation itself—it's to do with how this hypothetical-you perceives that interpretation and acts regarding it, or so it seems to me.

And indeed, I could see someone acting exactly the same way with an interpretation that has been expressly confirmed by the author.

Thus, it again seems to me that the issue isn't that people may "misinterpret", but rather that people sometimes get vehement, even violent, over their interpretations. (Whether those interpretations are accurate or not.)

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jul 6th 2023 at 3:57:23 PM

I agree with that, then, thank you it refined my thinking: It's the actions based on an interpretation that would be the real problem, not whether somebody has an alternative interpretation.

If somebody read Brave New World and concluded that polyamory was destroying society and that their activism should be leaving hate comments on OT3 fanfictions, and they said they did this because Brave New World showed them the light of their life's mission, then I can't say that it started with a misinterpretation of that specific text.

But if somebody read Brave New World and said that it was a detective mystery about finding a disfigured torturer-kidnapper who lives beneath an opera house, then that's... less malignant, I guess? But unless they're stating their framework of analysis in a way that makes that interpretation make sense or that it's original fiction they're working on that's thematically inspired by but is not the thing I thought we were talking about...then, I will still want to get away from that person because communicating about what I thought we were talking about is going to continue having something else get in the way. That conversation is still going to have diminishing returns.

And wanting to end a conversation that you find to be going nowhere doesn't seem all that problematic to me.

That doesn't (to my mind) mean that there's anything wrong with them or with their interpretation—but if a conversation isn't advancing, then I see (in general, at least) no real problem with just "agreeing to disagree".

(Speaking for myself, I don't think that I would "want to get away from that person"—just perhaps end that conversation.)